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CHAPTER XXVII

Bryant Van Zandt was as much surprised and displeased as his brother had expected on the reception of the letter announcing his marriage.

"Eliot had no right to do it. He promised our mother, before she died, to stay single and care for the girls until they had homes of their own!" he exclaimed, vexedly, to his wife, to whom he imparted the shocking news before breaking it to his sisters.

Mrs. Van Zandt was a blonde of the very palest type.

 
"Her skin it was milk-white,
Her hair it was lint-white,
Bright was the blue of her soft rolling eye."
 

She was about twenty-eight, but looked younger through her fairness. She was rather pretty and petite, and, in her tasteful garb of blue and white, looked like an animated bisque doll.

But her color took a warmer tint than usual just now, and frowning darkly, she exclaimed:

"It was a shame for Eliot to go and make such a goose of himself. It would not have been so bad if he had married a girl with money, as you did, but to go and add another burden to the family is outrageous, I declare! What ever will the girls say?"

"They will be very angry, I am sure," said the lawyer; but when it was told to them, they did not make as much ado as their sister-in-law. They looked grave and sorry, indeed, but Maud, the elder, said, sensibly:

"It is very bad, but indeed, Bryant, I do not see how Eliot could have acted otherwise. Noblesse oblige, you know."

It was the motto that had ruled the lives of the Van Zandts for generations, and Bryant could not say one word; but his wife made a little moue of disdain.

"Noblesse oblige has nothing to do with it," she said; "or, if it had, it was the other way. He was bound to stay free for your and Edith's sake."

Pretty Edith answered quickly:

"No, no, for we shall not want him to help pay for our dresses much longer. Maud's book and my picture are almost done, and if we sell them, we shall have money of our own."

"Châteaux en Espagne!" Mrs. Van Zandt muttered softly, with a covert sneer.

She had no talent only for looking pretty and dressing well, and envied that of her more gifted sisters-in-law.

They were used to her sneers, and they winced, but seldom retorted. The dreamy, dignified Maud looked out of the window with a little sigh, and the more self-assertive Edith exclaimed:

"There's no use crying over spilled milk, anyhow, and Eliot's married for good and all. He has as much right to bring his bride home as you had, Bryant, so we may as well all make the best of it—there!"

"No one disputes his right, Edith, we only deplore his imprudence," Bryant answered, flushing. "As for me, I married a woman who would be no burden upon me, but Eliot candidly owns that he has made a mésalliance."

"Married a pauper and a nobody!" flashed his wife.

"It is no such thing. Let me see his letter. He did not say that!" cried Edith, angrily.

"Not exactly in those words, but it amounts to the same thing," Bryant Van Zandt answered. He threw her the letter, and said impatiently: "Well, you may fight it out among yourselves. I am going down-town."

He put on his hat and went out. Edith and Maud read their brother's letter together. Its deprecatory, almost pleading tone, touched their loyal young hearts.

"Poor Eliot, he could not help it. We must not scold," said Edith. "This old house is big enough for us all, isn't it, Maud?"

"Yes," she answered; but the sweet eyes were grave with trouble as she fixed them on Mrs. Van Zandt. She burst out suddenly:

"Oh, Sylvie, do not look so glum, please. Of course, we do not like it, and neither did Eliot, I fancy; but you must see there was no other way for a Van Zandt, so we must make the best of it."

"Fancy a Van Zandt—one of the Van Zandts, of Boston—bringing home an A B C school-girl as a bride!" was the disdainful answer she received.

Vivacious Edith cried out tartly:

"You need not take on such airs, Sylvie. You are not so learned yourself. New York girls never know anything but dressing and flirting."

"We marry into poor, learned families, and so adjust the difference," Mrs. Van Zandt replied, sarcastically.

Both the sisters flushed hotly at this coarse rejoinder.

Mrs. Van Zandt had been generous with her money, flinging it about her with the lavish hand of a spoiled darling of Fortune; but she was always conscious of its importance, never more so than when twitted with her execrable French, her questionable time in music, and her outrageous flirting, that sometimes drove poor Bryant wild with jealousy.

And so to this household, with its discordant elements, its supercilious mistress, its dreamy student, Maud, its enthusiastic, artistic Edith, came Una with her impassioned soul, her shy sensitiveness, her innocence and ignorance, and her heritage of beauty, yet branded already "pauper and nobody."

When she saw all those fair young faces grouped in the handsome drawing-room to meet her, her heart thrilled with timid delight. She had had so little to do all her life with the young and gay.

All at once, as it were, she was thrown into a house full of young and handsome people, and it was most pleasant. With pretty confidence, quite untouched with self-assertion, she received their greetings, kind on the part of the girls, patronizing on that of Mrs. Van Zandt, and reserved as regarded Bryant.

It was twilight when they arrived, and a cup of tea awaited them before the late dinner. Una sipped hers shyly under the fire of the strange eyes that were steadily taking in her tout ensemble, the simple, tasteful gray dress, the hat with gray feathers that seemed such a Quakerish setting for the lovely unique face, with its somber, dark eyes and slender, dark brows, its perfect chiseling, and its aureole of rich golden hair.

"I shall paint her portrait," Edith whispered, in a stage aside.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Bryant's wife was quite displeased when Eliot came frankly to her to ask that a separate suite of rooms be provided for his girlish bride.

"Do you hate her so much, then?" she queried, arching her pale brows disagreeably.

He started and looked annoyed.

"Who said I hated her? You are very much mistaken in the idea, Sylvie," he said, curtly. "I love Una quite as well, I have no doubt, as Bryant loves you."

"Why, then—" she began, but he interrupted quickly:

"Simply because the love is all on one side yet. My wife is wedded, yet not won. Her heart is that of a child still, and although she bears my name, I will claim no rights save a lover's until I win her woman's love."

Mrs. Bryant had only been acquainted with Una an hour, but she could have told Eliot a different story from that. Her quick eyes had seen the wealth of tenderness in the dark orbs of Una as they rested now and then on her husband's face, but Sylvie was more angry than any one supposed over this unexpected marriage. She was not unselfish enough to open the eyes of the blind young husband.

"Oh, very well, if you choose to make a chivalrous goose of yourself, Eliot," she answered, tartly, "I suppose she can have the best suite of guest-rooms—the ones I have been fixing up for my sister. But I can write a word to Ida not to come."

"Of course you will not. There are other rooms," he said, impatiently.

Sylvie shrugged her shoulders.

"Ida's used only to the best," she said, insolently.

He regarded her for a moment in stern silence. Underneath his usual gentle, nonchalant manner slept a will that was iron when needful. After a moment he said firmly:

"See here, Sylvie, my wife has the same right in my father's old house that Bryant's wife has. You have the best suite of rooms in the house, she must have the next best. If you have put anything from your own purse into the rooms, it can be removed into another room for Ida's use when she comes. Una knows, for I have told her, that the Van Zandts are poor—that we have nothing but this big, old-fashioned house, and such a small income that barely buys our sisters' dresses, and I have to eke out the rest by hard work. She does not expect anything luxurious, but I shall see that she has the best I can afford."

So the gage was thrown down, and Sylvie picked it up at once. She had the petty meanness to strip Una's rooms of all the pretty things she had placed in them for Ida, and they looked rather bare when she finished her task of despoliation. But Maud and Edith brought the prettiest things from their own rooms to fill up the void, indignant at her petty spite.

"I know what is the matter. She is mad because she can not marry Eliot to Ida now. It's what she's been fishing for all the time," Edith said, indignantly; and the sisters made a generous compact to fight the battles for the new-comer that their clear young eyes already saw were inevitable.

There was one person who took kindly at once to Una, and that was the middle-aged governess, Mrs. Wilson. When she had come first to teach the little Van Zandts, she had been a forlorn young widow, having lately buried her husband and her only child. She had taught Eliot when a little lad, and she had taught his sisters, growing gray in patient service of her well-beloved pupils. Now, in the fair, innocent face and great, dark eyes of Eliot's wife, she fancied a resemblance to the little daughter that had been in Heaven so long.

"I shall love to teach her all that I can," she said, with a dimness in her gentle brown eyes. "I love to look at her beautiful face with those solemn eyes so much like my dead Elsie's eyes."

And loving her first for Elsie's sake, she soon grew to love her for her own. Never was there pupil so eager to learn, so thirsty for knowledge, so untiring in application as was the neglected Little Nobody, as Mrs. Van Zandt still called her contemptuously in her thoughts.

CHAPTER XXIX

The first few months of Una's stay in her husband's home passed quietly and uneventfully. Fortunately for all concerned, Bryant's wife went off to spend the summer at Long Branch with her mother and sister. In the generosity of her heart, she took Bryant with her, so the household that was left was very quiet and peaceable.

The girls took their summer vacation from study, and Maud worked on her novel, Edith at her picture. In the school-room Mrs. Wilson and Una diligently climbed the ladder of knowledge through the long summer mornings. In the afternoons the four ladies took long country rides, and in the short evenings there were dinner and Eliot. They had music always to enliven them, and very often neighbors and friends dropped in and made the time pass agreeably. Often Eliot, who, as a newspaper man, had tickets to concerts, lectures, readings, and plays, took them out to pleasant entertainments. He managed, too, to buy Una a little brown pony to ride, and she had some charming morning canters by the side of her husband, who made the carriage-horse do service on his own behalf.

Sylvie Van Zandt would have said it was a humdrum life, but Eliot and Una thoroughly enjoyed it. Nay, to her it seemed an elysium, this bright home, with its kind, friendly faces and gentle words, so unlike her life with Mme. Lorraine.

Una had learned to read and write with perfect facility and surprising ease, and passed on to higher studies. Of French she already had some knowledge—indeed, as much as she had of English, having spoken either at will in her New Orleans home—so this language was very easy to acquire now. For music she developed a talent equal to that of her husband, and he was delighted to find that she had a sweet, low alto voice that blended in perfect harmony with his own.

She began to read poetry and novels now, and their strange sweetness thrilled her very soul. She learned that wonderful word, Love, and some of its subtler meanings. It grew to be the theme of her thoughts and dreams, although in the exquisite shyness that offset her child-like frankness she never even named the word to Eliot.

But, for all that, she began to comprehend its mystic meaning, and to say to herself, with deep tenderness:

"It is what Eliot feels for me and I for him."

Yet this blind young lover-husband said to himself sometimes, discontentedly:

"She is very bright over other lessons, but very slow learning the one I am trying to teach her so patiently every day."

Every day she grew more beautiful and graceful under the clever tuition of Mrs. Wilson, who delighted in her task of forming the unformed girl. They spent happy hours over the piano together, patient ones over books and blackboards.

For several months she never even heard the words "A Little Nobody," under which she had chafed so often at Mme. Lorraine's. Life began to have a new, sweet meaning, whose key-note was love.

She was so sorry when Eliot went away with his friendly hand-clasp in the morning, so glad when he returned in the evening. Sometimes she said to herself that she would not have minded kissing him now, as Maud and Edith did every morning; but, since the day when she promised to marry him, and then rejected his kiss, he had never offered another.

"I should not care for a cold, duty kiss," he thought. "I will wait for her love and her kisses together."

In the meantime, he worked very hard at his literary duties, trying to double the moderate salary he had enjoyed before his marriage, that his sisters might not feel the change. The pony had been quite an extravagance, but he had heard her express a timid wish for one, and by some severe self-denial in the matter of coats and cigars, had managed to gratify her wish. But he did not chafe against the silent sacrifices he made for her sake. Each one only made the dark-eyed girl dearer to his heart, and the memory of that last day in madame's prison always made him shudder and long to clasp her passionately to his heart.

On his strong white arm there was a slight scar made by the wound of a pocket-knife. He often looked at it when alone, and said to himself:

"To that little scar my darling owes her life."

But Una, all unconscious of the debt, still sweetly ignorant of his blindness, went on with her studies, and her music, and her poetry reading, making him the hero of all in her silent, adoring fashion.

There was one thing that touched and pleased him.

She had not forgotten one of the many songs with which he had beguiled the dreariness of their imprisonment, and she had insisted on learning each one. The two that she liked best were "The Warrior Bold" and "Two Little Lives." Mrs. Wilson and the girls noticed that she had a fashion of humming over one little verse very often to herself:

 
"It was a lark that sung in the heaven,
While all the world stood still to hear,
Many a maiden looked from her knitting,
And in her heart there crept a tear.
Down came the lark and sung to the daisy,
Sung to it only songs of love,
Till in the twilight slumbered the daisy,
Turning its sweet face to heaven above."
 

She never said to her young husband now, as she had said that time in their prison, "You are the lark and I the little daisy," but she thought it all the more, and the fanciful thought pleased her well.

Maud and Edith, who had first taken Una's part out of generous loyalty to their brother, now began to like their sister-in-law more for her own sake.

At first they said: "It is not so bad as we feared at first. She is learning very fast, and she is really very good and very pretty. And even although she is of obscure origin, she is a Van Zandt now, and that is enough."

Maud used to read her whole chapters of the wonderful novel, and when Una's color rose and her eyes sparkled with mirth or feeling, the young authoress was delighted. She took it as a tribute to her genius, and was cheered and encouraged in her delightful work. Edith, on her part, appropriated the girl for a model, and made her pose for her benefit every day in the little studio at the top of the house. At last the two girls unanimously voted her a decided acquisition.

"It is very fortunate Eliot had to marry her. She is a darling, and I can see that they are beginning to fall in love with each other," said Edith.

"I am so glad that it will turn out a love-match after all," Maud replied, with enthusiasm.

The days came and went, and brought the early, bleak New England autumn. It was time for Sylvie to come home, but Bryant came alone. His wife had gone to New York with her family to stay for the beginning of the social season. Every one but her husband was secretly pleased when she stayed until after the New-Year festivities. Maud and Edith were quite sure that they had got along more happily without her, although they were too polite to hint such a thing to Bryant.

At last she came in the middle of January. Ida Hayes, her sister, a younger edition of herself, came with her, and straightway the halcyon days of Una came to an end.

Sylvie came to her room that evening, when she was putting on her simple blue silk dress for dinner, with an air of importance and anxiety.

"Have you come to your senses yet—you two?" she demanded, brusquely. "If you have, I shall be glad, for I do so want these rooms for Ida."

Una, with her laces all awry, looked up blankly.

"I—don't—think—I understand," she answered.

"Pshaw! I mean, do you use the same suite of rooms as your husband?"

The pretty, wondering face did not change its color, the dark eyes only looked amazed.

"Of course not," Una said, and Sylvie's red lips curled.

"Of course not!" she mimicked, sneeringly. "Why, you silly child, you talk very strangely. Bryant and I share the same suite of rooms, do we not? All husbands and wives do who love each other."

CHAPTER XXX

Una commenced to fasten her laces with strangely trembling fingers.

"Eliot and I love each other!" she said, slowly.

"Oh, indeed?" said Sylvie, with a very incredulous giggle. "You did not when I went away. Have you done your courting since, as you had no time for it before you were married?"

The wonder, the half-dazed comprehension in the girl's pale face ought to have made her less pitiless, but it had been her dream and Bryant's to marry Ida to Eliot. She had said to herself many times that she could never forgive the Little Nobody that had thwarted her plans.

So with an angry heart and pitiless eyes she had thrust the point of a dagger into Una's heart.

But with proud, somber eyes the girl-wife said, gravely:

"You said you wanted these rooms for Miss Hayes. Very well, you can have them. I dare say Maud will give me another room."

"Oh, dear no, I would not turn you out of your room for the world, child!" suavely. She knew that Eliot would not permit it. "I only thought that if you had given them up and gone to Eliot's these would suit Ida. She always had them when she came before, and it does seem foolish, does it not, for man and wife to occupy six rooms when three would be enough? I hoped you and Eliot had become reconciled to your forced marriage ere this."

Driven to bay, Una cried out, angrily:

"Mrs. Van Zandt, you are talking the wildest nonsense. There was no forced marriage."

"Then why did Eliot write such a letter to my husband? Come to my room, I will show it to you since you dispute my word."

She caught Una's cold hand and half dragged her with her to her own room, where behind locked doors she gave the ignorant wife that fatal letter to read—fatal, because in Eliot's haste and worry he had stated only the bare facts of the case, and Una could not read between the lines the love that had filled his heart.

She read it—the lovely, trusting girl—every word. She comprehended it in part. What she could not fathom Sylvie pointed out in clearest language, and when she had made her cruel meaning clear as day, she said, maliciously:

"Noblesse oblige!"

A gasp, and the girl's heavy eyes turned dumbly on her face—dumb with a bitter, humble humiliation. Sylvie said, half deprecatingly:

"He did not love you at first, of course. How could he? When he came he asked me to give you a separate suite. I remonstrated, but he insisted. Of course I thought you would win him while I was away, and he would get over his foolishness."

Una had folded her white arms on the dressing-table, and was looking into her face with dazed, heavy eyes. She muttered, hoarsely:

"Oh, this is too dreadful! What must he, what must you all think of me?"

Sylvie replied, with cruel frankness:

"Of course we all felt angry with you at first. We were disappointed, too, for we had all expected that he would marry sister Ida. There had been no engagement, but it was understood. But there, no one blames you or him, child. As I said before, Eliot could not have acted any other way. Noblesse oblige!"

As if forgetful of her presence, Una murmured, sadly:

"Mon Dieu! what shall I do?"

Sylvie answered, with more sense than she had displayed in making these cruel revelations:

"Do? Why, nothing but make the best of it, as Eliot and the rest of us have done. What has happened can not be altered now, so you must try to make him fond of you, so that he shall no longer regret taking you and losing Ida; and, for one thing, you ought not to be so extravagant. There is that pony he bought you. I know he could not afford it, really, for he is poor. And to-night I saw him bring you hot-house flowers. I am afraid he is running into debt just to pamper your whims. Now, if he had married Ida, it would have been different. She would have brought him a fortune, and could have paid her own bills."

Pale as she would ever be in her coffin, Una stood listening, her heart beating wildly.

"I am in his way. Oh, I wish I could die now!" she was thinking wildly.

Sylvie, who had done all this out of sheer malice, gloated over the sight of her misery.

To herself she said spitefully:

"I am paying her back, the little pauper and nobody, for Ida's disappointment."

Then suddenly she remembered that it was almost dinner-time. She said carelessly:

"You had better go back to your room and finish dressing, Una; and remember, I would not have told you what I have, only that you disputed my word. I hope you will not run to Edith with it. It will only make matters worse. I dare say he will learn to love you in time."

"I shall run to no one with it," Una answered, in a strange voice. She moved to the door as she spoke, and passed out. Sylvie laughed mockingly.

"I have paid Eliot now for his insolence. I know he loves her to madness. I saw it in his eyes when she met him so coolly this evening. Well, this will put a stumbling-block between them that he will not easily pass."

And humming an opera air with heartless indifference, she made some slight addition to her already elaborate toilet, and went down-stairs.

Una's toilet, the light-blue surah silk with square neck and elbow-sleeves, was complete but for the handsome corsage bouquet Eliot had brought her an hour ago. She did not pin it on her breast; she took it in her hand and ran along the hall, then tapped softly at the door of the apartment that she knew had been designed for Miss Hayes's use.

Ida opened it, dazzling Una's eyes with the glitter of her satin and jewels. She frowned slightly at the intruder.

"I have brought you these flowers to wear," Una said, rapidly, thrusting them into Ida's white hand. Then she turned away and went along the hall with slow, lagging footsteps, down the broad, shallow staircase, and so to the drawing-room, her young face pale with emotion, and a strange, excited glitter in her dark eyes.